Revelations continue to produce outcomes on multiple levels in
numerous countries around the world

By Glenn Greenwald

September 24,
2013 "Information
Clearing House - "The
Guardian" -
I'm still working at trying to get the next set of
NSA stories published. That, combined with a rapidly
approaching book deadline, will make non-NSA-article postings
difficult for the next couple of weeks. Until then, here are a
few items to note regarding a point I have often tried to make:
namely, one of the most overlooked aspects of the NSA reporting
in the US has been just how global of a story this has become:

(1) Last week
it was revealed that Belgium's largest telecom, Belgacom,
was the victim of a massive hacking attack which systematically
compromised its system for as long as two years. Media outlets
suspected that the NSA was behind it, and the country's
Prime Minister condemned the attack as a "violation of a public
company's integrity."

But last
week, using documents obtained from NSA whistleblower Edward
Snowden, Laura Poitras and other der Spiegel journalists
reported in that paper that it was the GCHQ, Britain's
intelligence agency, that was behind the attack on its ally.
According to that report, the attack was carried out by
targeting individual engineers at the telecom with malware that
allowed GCHQ agents to "own" their computer and thus exploit
their access to the telecommunications system.

"The
disclosures are yet another illustration of the extremely
aggressive scope of the clandestine spy operations that have
been conducted by both the United Kingdom and the United
States. Infiltration of computer networks is usually more
commonly associated with Russian and Chinese government
hackers, but the British and Americans are at it, too, even
targeting their own allies' communications. The surveillance
tactics appear to have few limits, and while government
officials have played up the necessity of the spying for
counter-terrorism, it is evident that the snooping is often
highly political in nature."

Nobody
hacks as prolifically and aggressively as the two countries who
most vocally warn of the dangers of hacking.

(2) Along with
reporter Shobhan Saxena, I have
an article this morning in the Indian daily The Hindu
revealing that "in the overall list of countries spied on by NSA
programs, India stands at fifth place, with billions of pieces
of information plucked from its telephone and internet networks
just in 30 days."

(3) The report on
which I worked for the Brazilian television program Fantastico,
regarding
the NSA's targeting of the oil company Petrobras, received
attention in Latin America
and elsewhere primarily because it gave the lie to the
repeated claim of US officials that its electronic surveillance
is devoted only to national security and counter-terrorism and
not to industrial and commercial espionage. But several of the
documents we published
detail some rather extreme NSA and GCHQ tactics of deception,
including taking on the identity of Google to launch "man in the
middle attacks" on unsuspecting internet users.

(4) The New York
Times had
a quite good editorial yesterday on the domestic dangers
posed by the NSA's efforts to break internet encryption. The
Editorial details numerous ways that we have learned that the
NSA jeopardizes the privacy rights of Americans and the security
of the internet, and calls for serious limits on the NSA's
hacking powers. Are there really people who can read that and
think to themselves: I sure do wish
Edward Snowden had let us remain ignorant about all of this?

(5) There has long
been a glaring contradiction at the heart of the case for the
NSA made by its apologists (the most devoted of whom, as of
January 20, 2009, are Democrats). They insist that the NSA's
spying activities are legal and constitutional (even though a
2011 FISA court opinion - released only in the wake of the last
three months of scandal -
found the opposite). But the real contradiction is that
there have been almost no rulings on the legality or
constitutionality of these spying laws and the activities
conducted under them because the Obama DOJ -
exactly like the Bush DOJ before it - repeatedly raised
claims of standing and secrecy to prevent any such adjudication
(the Obama DOJ
relied on the five right-wing Supreme Court justices to win
that argument earlier this year and prevent any constitutional
or legal challenge to their domestic surveillance program).

Yet now,
as
the Hill reports, those arguments used by the DOJ to prevent
judicial rulings are being gutted by all of the revelations in
the wake of Snowden-enabled reporting. The Hill article quotes
the ACLU's Alex Abdo as follows:

"For
years, the government has shielded its surveillance
practices from judicial review through excessive secrecy.
And now that that secrecy has been lifted to some degree, we
now know precisely who is being surveilled in some of the
dragnet policies of the NSA, and those people can now
challenge those policies. . . . . No matter what you think
of the lawfulness of these programs, I think everyone should
think their legitimacy or illegitimacy is better debated in
public and decided by a court."

Does
anyone disagree with that? Is there anyone who thinks things
were better pre-Snowden when the DOJ could successfully block
legal challenges to the US government's spying activities by
invoking secrecy and standing claims?

(6) Haaretz this
weekend ran
a long article on the work I've done in the NSA case, with a
lengthy interview. It was by the excellent Israeli writer Noam
Sheizaf, and is one of the better and more informative articles
of this sort to have been published.

(7) The Guardian's
Readers' Editor Chris Elliott (the British equivalent of the
ombudsman) has
an interesting article assessing some of the critiques made
about our NSA reporting.

(8) A coalition
called "Stop Watching Us"
has been formed by
privacy and civil liberties groups
from
across the political spectrum, including the ACLU, EFF, Free
Press, Freedom Works, Occupy Wall Street, Demand Progress and
others. It has the support of
a wide
swath individuals such as internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee,
Daniel Ellsberg, Gabriella Coleman, Xeni Jardin, the actor Wil
Wheaton, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, and Anil Dash.

UPDATE

One item I
neglected to include: much ado was made when President Obama
announced several weeks ago that he would create an
"independent" review board to monitor NSA spying for civil
liberties abuses. But
as Associated Press detailed this weekend, the five members
he put on the board are largely Democratic loyalists if not
hard-core Obama loyalists:

"Four of the five review panel members previously worked for
Democratic administrations: Peter Swire, former Office of
Management and Budget privacy director under President Bill
Clinton; Michael Morell, Obama's former deputy CIA director;
Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism coordinator under
Clinton and later for President George W. Bush; and Cass
Sunstein, Obama's former regulatory czar. A fifth panel
member, Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago, leads a
university committee looking to build Obama's presidential
library in Chicago and was an informal adviser to Obama's
2008 presidential campaign.

"Stone
wrote in a July op-ed that the NSA surveillance program that
collects the phone records of every American every day is
constitutional.

"'We
would have liked a more diverse group,' said Michelle
Richardson, an ACLU legislative counsel who attended one
meeting for civil liberties groups."

Beyond
that, it's controlled by Obama's top national security official.
As AP put it: "with just weeks remaining before its first
deadline to report back to the White House, the review panel has
effectively been operating as an arm of the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA and
all other U.S. spy efforts. . . . Even the panel's official name
suggests it's run by Clapper's office: 'Director of National
Intelligence Review Group on Intelligence and Communications
Technologies.'" Read
the full AP article for what a total farce this all is.

UPDATE II
[Tues.]

Two other
items that may be of interest: first, Guardian editor-in-chief
Alan Rusbridger was the guest for the full hour yesterday on
Democracy Now, discussing the paper's role in reporting the NSA
stories, and the video and transcript of the interview are
here; second, marking our collaboration on a series of
articles about spying on Indians, the Hindu has a long interview
with me on a variety of related topics,
here.

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